In-depth, detailed assessments of the trends and issues shaping transatlantic debates.
Executive Summary Democracy in Europe is under growing pressure. Authoritarian regimes like Russia and the People’s Republic of China are conducting increasingly sophisticated foreign interference campaigns that blend information manipulation, cyb [...]
Introduction It is easy to dismiss foreign information operations as playing out at the national level, designed to influence federal policymakers and Beltway insiders. But these threats transcend the “Beltway Bubble”. Increasingly, foreign nation [...]
Executive Summary Combating foreign interference in democracies, once a fringe policy issue on both sides of the Atlantic, has become one of the key policy and societal challenges of our time. It was not long ago when this set of issues would be b [...]
Executive Summary Over the past year, ASD at GMF, the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) have collaborated to develop the Information Laundromat, an open-source tool to uncover content and metadata simila [...]
Executive Summary In 2024, nearly half of the world’s population is heading to the polls. One of the biggest of these contests is the 2024 European Parliament elections from June 6–9, in which 366 million voters in the union’s 27 member states wil [...]
Researchers from two European universities with support from ASD have uncovered evidence that a small network of Polish news blogs—Lega Artis, News na Dziś, and Daily Blitz—may serve as pathways for Russian state media and pro-Kremlin media to reach [...]
Introduction The typical local election official in the United States is a white woman who is older than 50, earns more than $40,000, does not have a college degree, and is less likely today than in the past to have extensive experience in electio [...]
As we step into 2024, an unprecedented four billion people globally are gearing up to participate in what is set to be the largest election year in history. At the forefront of this democratic marathon is Taiwan, whose January elections not only ina [...]
Since coming to power in 2015, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party has eroded media freedom and pluralism, taking over public media and hindering independent outlets. While PiS’s control of the information environment via television, radio, and pri [...]
Introduction “Would you rather have the bitter truth or more sweet lies?” This is the question posed by an assertive series of videos produced by the State Department in recent months, targeting Russian audiences, that juxtapose statements by Russ [...]
Introduction As the de facto gateway to the vast troves of information available online, search services play a critical role in the modern information ecosystem. They are often the starting points for people’s questions about the world around the [...]
Executive Summary Ukraine has one of the most vibrant civil societies in the world. In the decade since it launched and led the Revolution of Dignity, Ukrainian civil society has held successive governments’ feet to the fire while at the same time [...]
Executive Summary Ukraine has become a different country over the past decade. Compared to the closed post-Soviet oligarchy that it was before the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine is now an open society governed as a vibrant democracy that resp [...]
Introduction In recent years, political podcasting has boomed in the United States, with new series emerging across the political spectrum. Due to the medium’s decentralized nature, it is difficult to grasp the total audience for these shows, but [...]
Executive Summary The October 15, 2023 Polish parliamentary election will not be fair. The country’s last fair election was in 2015, when the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) came to power and promptly set about undermining constitutional govern [...]
Introduction Democratic backsliding in old, new, rich, and poor democracies has accelerated, as International IDEA, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) have all studied. Yet they have been slow to res [...]
Introduction When people perform tasks in a complex work environment, mistakes are bound to happen. Election systems are no exception. Although the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections in the United States were free, fair, and well-adminis [...]
Executive Summary Remarkably, while fighting for their lives against Russian invasion, Ukrainians continue to wage their long internal battle against oligarchy and corruption. Ukraine is midway through this generational struggle, which began on th [...]
Introduction Protections are baked into each stage of US election administration. For example, nearly every state has paper records of each vote, safeguards to ensure the chain of custody of those ballots, and the ability to go back and count each [...]
Executive Summary The greatest threats facing the two most consequential elections in and around Europe in 2023—Turkey in May and Poland in the fall—come from autocratic corruption within these two backsliding democracies. Both these countries are [...]
Introduction As a result of the 2020 and 2022 federal elections, the job of administering elections has dramatically changed in the United States, and the demands on the dedicated officials that run our elections have also increased. The people wh [...]
Federico Castiglioni is a Researcher working in the program “EU, politics and institutions” at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI). Etienne Soula is a research analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy as the German Marshall Fund of the U [...]
Introduction Insider threats are not new to election administrators. As the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) director, who formerly served as director of elections for South Carolina, recently noted, “[Elec [...]
This article was jointly published by the Istituto Affari Internazionali and the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Views expressed are the authors' alone. Introduction Should the polling prove accurate, Italy will soon be governed by its most radi [...]
China's comprehensive sanctions regime against Lithuania underlines the grave need for Europe to bolster its resilience to economic coercion. As EU officials begin the process of adopting the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) and other strategies to p [...]
Introduction False claims of a stolen election in 2020 shook U.S. democracy to its foundation, seeding ideas and establishing behavior that will reverberate in elections for years to come. The unprecedented number of false claims alleging election [...]
Introduction The 21st Century started with the promise of how technologies can be used to bolster, not undermine, democracies, activism, and human rights. However, the maddening pace at which digital technologies have evolved in recent years means [...]
Executive Summary As the war in Ukraine unfolds, Russian propaganda about the conflict has gotten a boost from a friendly source: government officials and state media out of Beijing. In multiple languages and regions around the world, China’s “wol [...]
The Alliance for Securing Democracy’s David Levine and the Carter Center’s Avery Davis-Roberts make the case that more nonpartisan observation is critical to ensuring the integrity of future elections and provide steps for improving nonpartisan obs [...]
Introduction and Summary Kleptocracies do not stop at their own borders. The same actors, networks, tactics, and resources that they wield to prevent democracy and rule of law from sprouting at home are also repurposed for foreign aggression. Whil [...]
Executive Summary When kleptocrats, foreign intelligence services, homegrown autocrats, and other malign actors weaponize corruption to undermine U.S. democracy, their financial secrecy relies upon the services of ten sectors of U.S. professionals [...]
ASD's Nad’a Kovalčíková and Globsec's Dominika Hajdu and Miroslava Sawiris present the Alliance for Healthy Infosphere's Ten Transatlantic Principles for a Healthy Online Information Space. The U.S. Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, fueled by dis [...]
ASD Elections Integrity Fellow David Levine and the Open Source Election Technology Institute’s Global Director of Technology Development and Open Standards Edward Perez lay out ways to bolster election integrity by strengthening the security of el [...]
Introduction The 2020 presidential election was called the most secure in U.S. history, largely due to efforts to protect the nation’s different physical and cyber infrastructure. This was a triumph considering the physical, cyber, and even human [...]
This paper is the second in a series on technology policy through the lens of national security, published in partnership with the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. Read the first paper on the digita [...]
Executive Summary The Biden administration has a historic opportunity to unify U.S. domestic and foreign policy through an aggressive mission to combat corruption and kleptocracy. Middle-class Americans are frustrated by perceptions of corruption [...]
Introductory Letter Governments, civil society and industry recognize the importance of a secure, stable and accessible cyber and digital information space, especially in today’s challenging and unpredictable environment. In November 2018, the Fr [...]
Introduction and Summary In his push for bipartisan efforts on voting rights legislation, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) warned that “the lack of transparency in many campaign finance rules provides multiple avenues for foreign and national adversaries [...]
Executive Summary The 2016 presidential election served as a wakeup call to the threat of authoritarian interference, and in the years since, many segments of American society—from the federal government to private companies and civil society gro [...]
ASD’s Elections Integrity Fellow David Levine and the Center for Democracy and Technology's Senior Technologist in Elections and Democracy William T. Adler urge President Biden to establish a bipartisan presidential commission to recommend ways to [...]